XFX chooses to "skip"NVIDIA'sGTX 480 and GTX 470 in favor ofATI'shigh-end cards. Could still release budgetconsciousFermiderivativesin the future.When NVIDIA launched theGTX 480 andGTX 470 onFridayof last week, we were bombarded by the usual influx of press releases from board partners announcing their Fermi-based cards. There were two which were... [ Read full article ]

Is there a reason why XFX has bailed on NVIDIA? I thought I heard somewhere that they just didnt meet eye-to-eye so XFX told them no more. It's interesting that they are not doing the new 470 and 480s, as I believe there would be a good market for them. I mean, XFX offers modder safe waranty, and those cards hit 100C, most water cooling people would definitly take an XFX card.

Sounds to me like the margins are small on the nV cards. Probably team green wants quite a bit for their chips, and once you add in board and component costs, plus marketing, XFX just saw more green comming out of the red company.

With Fermi materializing the way it did, there is no doubt in my mind that many AIBs aren't too happy with NV at the moment.
Months behind ATI, performance not quite where it was hyped up to be, huge power and thermal envelopes.
Even without the single-GPU performance crown, I would argue that the Radeon 5800s are better products from a cost, design, and execution perspective.
Oh NV, a bit of humble pie would do you some good once in a while.

I imagine it would be quite risky for XFX to offer their double lifetime warranty on a card which does 93 Celsius at load...

In fact...whatever brands ARE manufacturing the new Fermi cards might be in for a lot of trouble because everyone will of course try to OC these cards - even those who don't know how to check for safe temperature levels. We're going to see a lot of user-fried cards I think...

The other aspect must be profit of course. The GTX 280 was a product which was losing the manufacturers at one point and I think the initial Fermi cards are too.

I imagine it would be quite risky for XFX to offer their double lifetime warranty on a card which does 93 Celsius at load...

In fact...whatever brands ARE manufacturing the new Fermi cards might be in for a lot of trouble because everyone will of course try to OC these cards - even those who don't know how to check for safe temperature levels. We're going to see a lot of user-fried cards I think...

The other aspect must be profit of course. The GTX 280 was a product which was losing the manufacturers at one point and I think the initial Fermi cards are too.